Loki: God of Mischief

In Marvel Studios’ “Loki,” the mercurial villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston) resumes his role as the God of Mischief in a series set after the events of “Avengers: Endgame.” Kate Herron directs the Disney+ series, with Michael Waldron serving as head writer. The show premiered in 2021.

SCANable performed 3D scans of sets, actors, props, and other items for the series, delivering LiDAR and photogrammetric data to support Marvel’s visual effects pipeline.

Skin has to survive being relit

A scan captures a subject under the light that was present when it was captured. That light is baked into the colour data — every highlight, every shadow in a crease, every specular hit on a forehead.

Drop that asset into a shot lit differently and the baked light fights the scene light. The result is a figure that is geometrically correct and still reads as pasted in, because it is carrying the illumination of a room it is no longer standing in.

The discipline that solves this separates the two. Cross-polarised photography isolates the diffuse response — colour without specular highlight — and a second pass recovers the specular and surface-normal information that makes skin behave like skin. What comes out is a relightable texture set rather than a photograph of a person.

Photometric capture is the part of the process that turns a good likeness into an asset a lighting artist can actually place anywhere in a sequence.

One performer, several characters

Stories built on variants and doppelgängers create shots where a single actor appears more than once, interacting with themselves at the same scale, in the same light, in the same frame.

Split-screen handles some of it. The rest depends on a digital version accurate enough to intercut with the practical performance, which is the same bar face replacement sets and for the same reason: the audience has the genuine article on screen for comparison.

Capturing the performer once, thoroughly, at high resolution is what makes every one of those shots feasible later. It also means the asset does not need to be recaptured each time the story finds another use for it. Cyberscanning with simultaneous arrays is how that single capture is made reliable enough to reuse.

Anchoring an invented world to real measurements

Some environments have no real-world counterpart at all. They are designed, built, and deliberately unlike anywhere the audience has been, which might suggest measurement matters less.

It matters more. An invented space has no familiar reference to correct against, so its internal consistency is the only thing holding it together. If the built portion is measured and the digital extension is derived from that measurement, the space behaves coherently as the camera moves through it — even though nobody has ever seen it before.

That coherence is what makes a stylised world feel like a place rather than a backdrop. Set and location scanning provides the measured half that everything invented is hung on.

See more Marvel Studios and streaming work in the portfolio.